big box of comics: Ryp’s Ripping Robocop Wraps

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Avatar Comics, Avatar Press, big box of comics, frank miller, indie box, Indie Comics, Juan Jose Ryp, robocop, robocop 2

Welcome back to another installment of the Big Box of Comics, where I share the treasures I’ve acquired thanks to this blog’s readers. Today we’ll look at a series of comics I picked up just for the covers—but oh, what covers they are!

In the summer of 1990, just before my final year of high school, Robocop 2 hit the big screen. A huge fan of the original movie, I had to see the sequel. This was before we had year-long lead-ups to summer blockbusters with so many trailers and leaks and hundreds of YouTubers making videos about the damn trailers and everything being over-hyped online until there’s no way any movie can live up to all that.

No, I just walked into the theater without knowing much of anything other than “Robocop is awesome,” and I took an unexpected journey. It was one of the first—if not the first—movie with an R rating I got to see on my own since I had turned seventeen that year, and my teenage mind was blown away. But what really caught me by surprise was when the end credits announced the movie was written by a comic-book creator whose work I knew: Frank Miller.

The stunning revelation made instant sense to me. Movies based on comic books are a dime a dozen now, but Robocop 2 was one of the first live-action films that really captured the essence of the over-the-top action, humorous parody, pointed social commentary, insane violence, and grim-and-gritty protagonists that characterized the tonal shift in many mainstream comics in the mid-to-late 1980s. Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns was a big part of that change, and his Robocop film had a lot in common with it.

But while the movie was so much fun in a “Rule of Cool” way, the comics adaptation based on Miller’s original script is a mean-spirited mess that lacks the movie’s focus and hilarity, and it will probably make you grateful for all the changes made for the film. Its best feature is the artwork by Juan Jose Ryp, a non-stop visual feast of intricately detailed hyper-violence that is gloriously exemplified by Ryp’s covers for the series—especially the wraparound covers.

Ryp drew my all-time favorite covers, and he is in fine form on Robocop where he renders cyborgs, cops, and criminals in chaotic combat scenes that completely destroy their urban environments. Although the series itself isn’t so great, I indulged in these works of art for my small collection of Ryp’s work for Avatar Press. Along the way, I also picked up some ripping Ryp wraps that were missing from my Anna Mercury and Wolfskin collections.

You could probably stuff a short box full of nothing but Ryp’s prolific output for Avatar. And who knows? Maybe one day I will. As Robocop says at the end of the movie version, “Patience, Lewis. We’re only human.”

Collector’s Guide: These covers appear on the original single issues of Frank Miller Robocop by Avatar Press (2003). If you lack the patience to track them all down in print, you can get the entire digital collection for about $20.

Ryp also did covers for Robocop: Wild Child and Robocop: Killing Machine, though he did not do the interior art and they are only sixteen pages each.

indie box: Sin City

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big box of comics, comic books, Dark Horse Comics, frank miller, indie box, Indie Comics, John Byrne, sin city, sin city tpb

It’s no secret that one of my favorite pieces of fiction is Frank Miller’s Sin City series. I discovered it at the Las Vegas public library about eighteen years ago when I checked out the A Dame to Kill For TPB. It was the most awesome thing I’d ever read, with over-the-top brutality and an atmosphere that was darker than the blackest noir. It was so intense about being intense that it was funny and morbidly serious at the same time, and the first thing I did after reading it was read it again. Then I tracked down the other stories! One had dinosaurs.

For a while I had the complete series in an awesome collected edition, but those books were smaller than the full-sized TPBs, and there’s just something about this series that suits being as big as possible. The original TPB collections also appear to include more pages than were printed in the original serialized formats, such as extra splash pages for multiple perspectives of Dwight holding a dude’s head underwater in a toilet in The Big Fat Kill. The one missing ingredient in the earliest TPBs is color, the use of just one primary color as an accent to individual stories, such as the yellow highlights in the TPB for That Yellow Bastard. Still, I’m okay without the color if I get a bigger page size!

The black and white art is insanely melodramatic, as shown in a couple pages of Marv walking in the rain from the first Sin City TPB, later titled The Hard Goodbye. The text is like a hard-boiled detective novel with the volume turned up to eleven. I not only love this scene, I love that it goes on for ten whole pages — eleven in the TPB!

While writing last week’s post about Next Men, I looked into some other John Byrne works I hadn’t seen yet, including his stint on The Sensational She-Hulk. That run is best known for relentlessly breaking the fourth wall and having the characters be aware they were in a comic book. Byrne based the fiftieth issue on a gag that he had been killed, and the cast needed to find a new writer and artist. So, he showed how some of his friends in the industry would do a She-Hulk story. That’s how we got a couple pages of a Sin City She-Hulk.

This post was made possible by this blog’s readers who use my affiliate links to buy comics. Recent store credit made it possible to reconnect with the Sin City TPBs that first hooked me on the series. Thank you!

frank miller interview on the world trade center attacks

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911, comics journal library, frank miller, gary groth, Indie Comics, interview, kim thompson, the World Trade Center, world trade center attacks

 
Collector’s Guide:
Frank Miller: The Comics Journal Library Vol. 2; 2003
Edited by Milo George

This wonderfully over-sized tome contains rare and classic Frank Miller art, covers, and page layouts to illustrate six interviews and an essay. Gary Groth takes three of the interviews, and Kim Thompson has one. Its 130 lavish pages give you candid moments with Miller the artist at important phases in his career from 1981 to 2003.

The final interview explores Miller’s response to the attacks on the World Trade Center. His stark, simple images speak powerfully in his two-page contribution to 9-11: Artists Respond Vol. 1. Groth doesn’t seem to get the point right away, but excels at giving Miller an opportunity to speak his mind. What begins with an inquiry into an abandoned project about the life of Jesus of Nazareth turns to a discussion of comics as war-time propaganda. Miller expresses ideas which we now know became the book Holy Terror.

Miller and Groth discuss the two things you never want to talk about at a party: religion and politics. In other interviews in this book, they sometimes disagree. This makes for spirited discussions and an outstanding read.

Miller also talks about his anti-censorship work, characters he created or left his mark on, and the nuts and bolts of actually producing ground-breaking work. In one of our favorite anecdotes, he recalls how he and Lynn Varley collaborated with their printer to create a new process for handling the nearly all-black pages in Ronin. Here we get a sense of Miller as an inventor on the cutting edge of comic book art production.

The images below are not the complete interview, which spans twelve pages. But, they give you a taste of the art and ideas within. We love huge books, great conversations, and Frank Miller’s art. This book handsomely delivers all three.